First UK exhibition of artist's reclining giant

Monumentally disturbing ... Ron Mueck's In Bed
His hyper-real sculptures are fascinating and repellent in equal measure, panned by some critics yet apparently loved by the public. The debate about Ron Mueck will doubtless reignite when his work In Bed goes on display in the UK for the first time this summer.

The bulk of this work is almost threatening. But if this is a matriarchal figure - it is modelled on Mueck's wife, says the exhibition's curator, Keith Hartley - it is certainly an unsettling one. She seems preoccupied, anxious, perhaps grief-stricken; a character in search of a story.

In 2003 the National Gallery in London staged an exhibition of Mueck as part of a residency he had there. The work suffered harsh reviews in some quarters but none the less was hugely popular with the public.

So what is the appeal of this work? "The thing that grabs is not just that it's exceptionally lifelike," Mr Hartley said. "His work is always bigger or smaller than lifesize and somehow this seems to affect you ... With In Bed, it looks real, you expect it to be real and then of course you realise almost straight away it can't be. But it intimidates you. The change of scale creates this intensity. It's something that writers have played with: think of Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels."

Mueck, 47, began his career as a model-maker for TV and film, working on shows such as the Muppets. In 1996, an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London included a room of Paula Rego canvases and also, unexplained, a sculpture of a cheeky young boy clad only in Y-fronts.

Rego had asked Mueck, her son-in-law, to sit for her as Gepetto while making a Pinocchio figure. The cheeky young boy was the outcome. Mueck was sought out by Saatchi, who bought Dead Dad and exhibited it in the Sensation! show at the Royal Academy in 1997. The rest, as they say, is history: Mueck became, as it were, a full-time Gepetto.

Unlike Pinocchio, of course, these figures are never going to become real people. But part of their fascination, perhaps, is the chink of hope or fear that they might - like Pygmalion's living statue, Galatea, or perhaps a golem.

Mueck's working methods are traditional. He models in clay, gradually scaling up to the size he requires. A cast is made and the figure is moulded in silicone, or, for the larger figures, in glass fibre. Painstaking efforts are made to ensure the figure bears no traces of its origin; all seam marks are smoothed out and meticulous attention is paid to skin tone and hair. Last come the eyes, sculpted separately and fitted into place to bring the piece into its deathly life.

· Ron Mueck is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, August 5 - October 1